David Tremlett (St. Austell, Cornwall, 1945) – an artist with a consolidated international curriculum and sixty years of research under his belt – was invited to Reggio Emilia at the suggestion of Marina Dacci, to visit the Ex Caffarri feed mill: a building located in the northern area of the city and already the recipient of a degree of refurbishment work. The artist chose to work on the thirteen large silos and the adjacent façade of the building in order to create a visible reflection of a place dedicated to education and the aggregation of communities, especially young people, and one which hosts the Reggio Children Foundation, the Remida Creative Recycling Centre, the Lego Foundation, the MaMiMò Theatre Centre and Reggiana Boxe Olmedo boxing gym.
For over twenty years now, Reggio Emilia has chosen to invest in key institutional contemporary art projects, for the reconfiguration of problematic areas or those going through transformation phases, with a view to fostering social and educational enhancement. Between 2003 and 2006, the public art project Invito a… was conceived, proposed and implemented by the artist Claudio Parmiggiani, involving four protagonists of international art – Luciano Fabro, Eliseo Mattiacci, Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt – to create permanent works in various parts of the city. This project was further added to in 2022 by CuriosaMeravigliosa, the collective artwork spearheaded by Joan Fontcuberta.
This is the background to The Organ Pipes, one of the largest permanent artistic interventions Tremlett has ever undertaken: “Initially, the project didn’t have a title,” says Tremlett, “but gradually I started to think about the purpose of these large pipes and wondered why they appealed to me so much. I realised that when I enter a cathedral or a church, I see organ pipes going up the walls along with sound inside them. These silos have all the same magnificence: they are tall and tubular and seem to have something to do with sound. The thirteen elements rise skywards, overwhelmed by a cacophony of tubes and intertwining lines that reminded me so much of organ pipes and the music they emit.” The silos of the former Caffarri (a disused feed factory) occupy 750 square metres with a total length of 75 metres, giving each a façade of 100 square metres, standing 11.3 metres high. The application stage took about a month with the help of a specialised team. More than 100 litres of acrylic paint were used for this intervention, the palette of which was chosen by the artist after a specific study of the area hosting the work: the greens evoke the surrounding vegetation while the greys and browns recall the original materials, metal and brick. “In ‘sound’ terms,” the artist continues, “I worked on the surface, moving from lighter to darker shades of colour and vice versa, creating movements from high to low, from low to high and from dark to light, from light to dark. There is a rhythm in all this. So the silos are transformed into a sort of musical score. This is the conclusion I came to: colour and rhythm come together here. Of course you cannot hear any sound, but there is musicality in what I have tried to create. This work marks the presence of a training centre, and it may be a source of inspiration for young people to think how an artist heard music and rhythm by working with shapes, light and colour.” Tremlett confirms an artistic vocation that has always underpinned his work: operating in space not by superimposing onto it but by endowing it with new potential, a new lease of life.
The exhibition Another Step, curated by Marina Dacci, accompanies the major public art intervention by creating a link between the outlying territories of the city and the town centre. “The idea of a sound score, an element of inspiration for the permanent work The Organ Pipes,” Marina Dacci explains, “is further developed in the rooms of the exhibition Another Step, held in the monumental complex of the Chiostri di San Pietro. The exhibition is an all-round homage to Tremlett’s research, featuring around seventy works – drawings, collages and text compositions – dating from 1969 to 2023, more than half of which have never been exhibited before, being largely focused on his studio work.
“The exhibition,” continues the curator, “is put together with various temporal layers in each room, along some of the artist’s own lines of research that demonstrate his consistency and continuity over time and in particular his outlook as a constant traveller; the joy of discovery as measured by his physical advancement creates a personal mapping and reinvention of places; his relationship with architecture and its visionary reinterpretation, transforming them into abstract landscapes and soundscapes, in which the movement of the body and gaze are viewed as part of the artist’s sculptural approach. His relationship with language is understood as the framework of his oeuvre, be it in the form of alphabets or of small poems composed through free association; and his relationship with space is an expression of the sound element accompanying all his works, as well as showcasing his close relationship with Italy over the years.”
The artist has also made a precious permanent intervention entitled Interior inside the monumental complex of San Pietro: a small wall drawing using pastels, rubbed by hand onto the wall inside a niche in the Sala delle Colonne. Its lines frame and follow the progression of the surface, and the colours graduate from greys to sage and forest greens, offering a virtual breakthrough of the room’s surface. “Interior,” says Marina Dacci, “is a mystical entrance that affords a glimpse onto the elsewhere.
The exhibition unfolds over eight rooms in the historic Chiostri, one of which is in fact dedicated to the preparatory sketch of the permanent work The Organ Pipes. A video documenting the process of its creation and two vitrines housing rare artist’s books and other documentation materials are also on display.
The exhibition is accompanied by the book, published by Gli Ori – editori contemporanei in Italian and English, which documents both the permanent work and the exhibition, featuring texts by Luca Massimo Barbero and Marina Dacci, and creating a pathway for reading and exploring both Tremlett’s poetics and his modus operandi.
